The Confessions of Saint Augustine by Saint Augustine - A complete eBook in pages (81 / 441)

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The Confessions of Saint Augustine by Saint Augustine
Book, page 81 / 441

                           CHAPTER III

      3. Let me now lay bare in the sight of God the twenty-ninth
year of my age. There had just come to Carthage a certain bishop
of the Manicheans, Faustus by name, a great snare of the devil;
and many were entangled by him through the charm of his eloquence.
Now, even though I found this eloquence admirable, I was beginning
to distinguish the charm of words from the truth of things, which
I was eager to learn. Nor did I consider the dish as much as I
did the kind of meat that their famous Faustus served up to me in
it. His fame had run before him, as one very skilled in an
honorable learning and pre-eminently skilled in the liberal arts.

      And as I had already read and stored up in memory many of the
injunctions of the philosophers, I began to compare some of their
doctrines with the tedious fables of the Manicheans; and it struck
me that the probability was on the side of the philosophers, whose
power reached far enough to enable them to form a fair judgment of
the world, even though they had not discovered the sovereign Lord
of it all. For thou art great, O Lord, and thou hast respect unto
the lowly, but the proud thou knowest afar off.[123] Thou drawest
near to none but the contrite in heart, and canst not be found by
the proud, even if in their inquisitive skill they may number the
stars and the sands, and map out the constellations, and trace the
courses of the planets.

      4. For it is by the mind and the intelligence which thou
gavest them that they investigate these things. They have
discovered much; and have foretold, many years in advance, the
day, the hour, and the extent of the eclipses of those luminaries,
the sun and the moon. Their calculations did not fail, and it
came to pass as they predicted. And they wrote down the rules
they had discovered, so that to this day they may be read and from
them may be calculated in what year and month and day and hour of
the day, and at what quarter of its light, either the moon or the
sun will be eclipsed, and it will come to pass just as predicted.
And men who are ignorant in these matters marvel and are amazed;
and those who understand them exult and are exalted. Both, by an
impious pride, withdraw from thee and forsake thy light. They
foretell an eclipse of the sun before it happens, but they do not

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